Hollow City

Hollow City

Copyright

Copyright © 2014 by Ransom Riggs

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2013914959

eISBN: 978-1-59474-620-8

Designed by Doogie Horner

Cover photograph courtesy of John Van Noate, Rex USA, and the Everett Collection

Production management by John J. McGurk

Quirk Books

215 Church St.

Philadelphia, PA 19106

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v3.1_r1

Dedication

FOR TAHEREH

Epigraph

And lo! towards us coming in a boat

An old man, grizzled with the hair of eld,
Moaning: “Woe unto you, debased souls!

Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens.

I come to lead you to the other shore;
Into eternal darkness; into fire and frost.

And thou, that yonder standest, living soul,

Withdraw from these people, who are dead!”
But he saw that I did not withdraw …

—Dante’s Inferno

, Canto III

PECULIAR PERSONAE

PECULIAR PERSONAE

JACOB PORTMAN

Our hero, who can see and sense hollowgast

ABRAHAM PORTMAN

(DECEASED)

Jacob’s grandfather, killed by a hollowgast

EMMA BLOOM

A girl who can make fire with her hands, formerly involved with Jacob’s grandfather

BRONWYN BRUNTLEY

An unusually strong girl

MILLARD NULLINGS

An invisible boy, scholar of all things peculiar

HORACE SOMNUSSON

A boy who suffers from premonitory visions and dreams

OLIVE ABROHOLOS ELEPHANTA

A girl who is lighter than air

ENOCH O’CONNOR

A boy who can animate the dead for brief periods of time

HUGH APISTON

A boy who commands and protects the many bees that live in his stomach

FIONA FRAUENFELD

A silent girl with a peculiar talent for making plants grow

CLAIRE DENSMORE

A girl with an extra mouth in the back of her head; the youngest of Miss Peregrine’s peculiar children

ALMA LEFAY PEREGRINE

Ymbryne, shape-shifter, manipulator of time; headmistress of Cairnholm’s loop; arrested in bird form

ESMERELDA AVOCET

An ymbryne whose loop was raided by the corrupted; kidnapped by wights

NONPECULIAR PERSONAE

NONPECULIAR PERSONAE

FRANKLIN PORTMAN

Jacob’s father; bird hobbyist, wannabe writer

MARYANN PORTMAN

Jacob’s mother; heiress to Florida’s second-largest drugstore chain

RICKY PICKERING

Jacob’s only normal friend

DOCTOR GOLAN

(DECEASED)

A wight who posed as a psychiatrist to deceive Jacob and his family; later killed by Jacob

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

(DECEASED)

Essayist, lecturer, poet

PART I

CHAPTER I

We rowed out through the harbor, past bobbing boats weeping rust from their seams, past juries of silent seabirds roosting atop the barnacled remains of sunken docks, past fishermen who lowered their nets to stare frozenly as we slipped by, uncertain whether we were real or imagined; a procession of waterborne ghosts, or ghosts soon to be. We were ten children and one bird in three small and unsteady boats, rowing with quiet intensity straight out to sea, the only safe harbor for miles receding quickly behind us, craggy and magical in the blue-gold light of dawn. Our goal, the rutted coast of mainland Wales, was somewhere before us but only dimly visible, an inky smudge squatting along the far horizon.

We rowed past the old lighthouse, tranquil in the distance, which only last night had been the scene of so many traumas. It was there that, with bombs exploding around us, we had nearly drowned, nearly been torn apart by bullets; that I had taken a gun and pulled its trigger and killed a man, an act still incomprehensible to me; that we had lost Miss Peregrine and got her back again—snatched from the steel jaws of a submarine—though the Miss Peregrine who was returned to us was damaged, in need of help we didn’t know how to give. She perched now on the stern of our boat, watching the sanctuary she’d created slip away, more lost with every oar stroke.

Finally we rowed past the breakwater and into the great blank open, and the glassy surface of the harbor gave way to little waves that chopped at the sides of our boats. I heard a plane threading the clouds high above us and let my oars drag, neck craning up, arrested by a vision of our little armada from such a height: this world I had chosen, and everything I had in it, and all our precious, peculiar lives, contained in three splinters of wood adrift upon the vast, unblinking eye of the sea.

Mercy.

*   *   *